Money and I have an odd relationship. I never want to have to deal with it, but I’m always left needing more. I’ve never been great at handling my own money, and I’m always ever-so-willing to offer my art for free.

So something must be done. I’d be perfectly happy living the life of the impoverished artist if it wasn’t for the fact that living a comfortable life is a part of my happiness. It seems that, in my situation, the only way to not be concerned about money would be to have quite a lot of it.

But I could never see at as a virtuous thing just to have money. It is not an end-in-itself, not an ultimate goal. I do not look at people in a life of luxury and think “I wish I had that” and “I’m going to work as very-hard as I can to have that thing. Having things is boring. Every time I have a thing it immediately loses its luster. I am not into things, but I am into events.

Having events, or creating them, is costly. Sharing a dinner with a loved one, flying or driving long distances to see friends, even visiting the family, it all claws at the pockets. And maybe it’s my own fault. Maybe it’s fate, or bad luck, or some mechanic of the universe wrenching at my life thinking “once this thing is fixed, it’ll run like a dream.”

It doesn’t really matter. I have, on the whole, exactly what I want. Family, friends, positive and healthy relationships. I am, to be blunt, alive. Most of the time I don’t ask for much more than that. It is, after all, more than most of the human beings that have ever lived have. It keeps me happy.

But then there’s the crossroads, laying down in the middle of the clock with a gargantuan X. “What are you doing with your time.” Or, even more poignantly, “what have you changed in the world.” I want to change the world. Not in some grand, sweeping way. I’m not an open-to-the-public narcissist. I don’t even believe one person can change the world in any significant way (without support of the community).

A ripple. First an idea, it won’t go away. Then an action, with honesty, empathy, and virtue. Executed with humility. A butterfly effect of happiness. Smile at one person on the street, or two. Then they might smile at the bank teller, or say thank you in the perfect time of day to a worn-out cashier. Happiness is exponential.

But to be in the world costs money. Existential amounts of money.

I’ve had friends that have forgotten my name because I didn’t have enough gas to hang out any more. I’ve missed opportunities to experience and share art because I was trying to pull overtime and pay my utility bill.

It’s not a crisis. It’s just how it all starts catching up. Each bill falling one more piece of sand in the hourglass. I’m tired of deserts. I want rain. Not for greed. Not because I’m lazy. I’m just thirsty, I’ve been dancing as long as I can because in that dizzy moment I can sense something on the border of of perfection.

I’ll work hard for it. I’ll give you all I have. I know, in the end, all debts will be paid.

Here’s to life, and in it, freedom. May your Work and Fortune guide you through it.

You can’t step your toes into the rabbit hole. The wormhole chooses you, all or nothing. Enter the void and cross the veil, dive into it. It swallows you voraciously, you have no will, ego, consciousness left. The path of patterns break apart and you are left stranded. You must fall into it, merging into the mirror. All glimpses are illusion of material consciousness (shells breaking apart into linear time). Give it up (letgoletgo), surrender into the void. You will not recognize death until it swallows you. Mortality is your only gift, give it up. You need nothing. Living is bigger than you, space spirals into organic growth with root systems stretching their mathematical patterns beyond your realization. The master tunes into his will by bending reality into himself (bends himself to occupy being).

Glass trees, prismatic, nymphs dancing through shifting fractals, a network of coincidences collapsing into itself, in the grass blades, naked bodies moaning, convulsing, silent to the holographic worlds of the hermit stumbling drunkenly into the fool dancing to his hypnotic wisdom,the ignorance of innocence corrupted with discipline sinking into the cortex of my limbic system,channeling existence through the will of persistent imagination,cracking open patterns of automatic behavior and telepathic communication.

Another lazy day in the sun formulating the rotation of celestial bodies travelling through incessant determination. We are beautiful beings linked as the ego becomes aware of the preliminal systems, sharing an altered mindspace, intertwining ribcages of distorted, heart-racing empathy.

Can you see me with a broken antenna, spines bent in the storm, twist me until you receive the snowy signal? The feed is dim against the moonlight, your small chance to stare at the stars. The body warps until it feels itself floating in the transmission, can we find our way home on it, out of body and sinking into our own ways back. Your face shimmers into every person you’ve ever shown me. The storm bolts uprightin my bed, still trying to breathe underwater. What an insane fool I’ve been to believe myself for this long. I would apologize if it meant something. Sing to me and I’ll fall asleep, even if it means I’ll never see you again.

Travel through me like time,a desert landscape of moons rising over midnight wastelands,full of signs, correspondences, and hallucinations, coincidences and liquid interactions (alchemy, breathing the cancerous fumes of quicksilver and physics),

Out of gas and stranded, we still stumble into miracles in the kindness of strange people,head full of empty pockets of stories and a long road twisted into the future.

The siren song is finally deadly enough to listen to, lost on a ship, sailing into the fractured future. It unwinds time’s selfish clock. Waves of space wash into my face as we dance and we become an image of panoramic sunrise, virtually projecting itself onto the backs of our eyes like a hologram.

The green field tempts me, the light glimmering through the leaves onto supple, nubile bodies like an endless delusion, a prismatic charm of delight, hedonism, machinery. Enchanting lover, mesmerizing muse, serendipitous succubus, turn your whole inside out until i can sense you breaking free from the cage of your skin.

Your tongue burned a hole in my ribs the size of a key, your nimble fingers tumbling my chamber. Your mouth fills me with the sound of unlocking, bolt by bolt by bone I am opening. I am opening.

A drink in a sideshow carnival, a sex death wish, a list of inconsequential disasters. Fate emanates into kismet serendipity. Chaos answers to nothingness and order cracks open the flower of self to sink into nonsense. The pain is numbness and you can share with me, sedative, unconscious inconsistency, playing in the mirror against itself. The egg is a tomb of self-creation. We were born in death to live matter from the origin of motion.

I can feel my body casting shadows, the sun vibrating into my chest, shifting my heart into a cloudy web of laser beams. I am melting into the earth, curling up in her endless chambers, the cave of my mouth yawning into the sky, crumbling with dirt. My head is overflowing with birds diving into the blue green water of my hands, swimming into the waves. Space is expanding through me, stretching me, filling me with emptiness. Pour your kisses into me, tongue of light. Throw my shadows onto the ground, carry them into your bed until they sleep, burn them into gold, these elemental dreams.

Concerned that a singular, sectarian, majority religion is over-represented in media and government, David Suhor responds to the Supreme Court’sTown of Greece vs. Galloway decision allowing prayer before legislative and town hall meetings. David Suhor, a Pensacola musician singer/songwriter, performed a Neopagan/Wiccan ceremony, the Evocation of the Watchtowers, to demonstrate the need that ALL or NONE religions must be represented in the political sphere.

Personally, I think he performed beautifully, and I’m happy to see marginalized religions brought to the forefront to get a little honest screentime. Even if this is a challenge to the decision, demonstrating the discomfort and alienation that atheists and people of varying religions might feel during a Christian invocation, it struck a chord with me. In its action, it is kind. At its face, defiant. In its heart, inclusive and beautiful.

I believe any public operation of government should avoid exclusivity. Of course, many people cite the slippery slope argument, concerned that they’ll have to let ANY nutjob up to offer whatever insane mumblings they might believe qualifies as prayer. Well, in my opinion, that’s exactly the point. Just because we’re used to a certain kind of “crazy” doesn’t make it better than any other kind of crazy.

But David doesn’t come off as crazy or confrontational. He is cordial in his introduction, offers a melodic invocation, thanks the participants, then dismisses himself. There is nothing disruptive about his actions, though they inherently challenge the norm. His performance is heartfelt, honest, and psychologically disruptive. My favorite kind of magic.

Well, it is what the Supreme Court decided. All religious views may have their airtime, and, as exhausting as that might sound, I’m looking forward to it. Maybe a “witchdoctor” will come in to offerAyahuasca and sing Icaros. Perhaps a zany zealot of Odin will break into the courthouse and make it rain.

Until then, we’ll have to put our big “Religious Tolerance” pants on and move through the world with some sense of authenticity, the kind of character that can’t be disrupted by a simple prayer. You know, a structure of psyche that isn’t rattled by the “annoyance” of marginalized peoples receiving and creating representation for themselves and other minorities.

The public billboard is a busy place and needs to be big enough to hold all the signs, banners, sigils, and widgets of the people, because we have a lot to say. And somewhere in this din is a song. Perhaps one that will be auto-tuned.

So, thanks David Suhor, for the Evocation. Your Escambia County town hall prayer, in front of chairman Lumon May and the whole world, has been my favorite so far.

The temple burned in silence, memories of the dead
blown across the flat desert. Mourners gathered
one last time as the wind whipped
the frenzied flame, whispered and lifted
vortexes of smoke from its red skin
like the hand of a ghost wrapping
my last words around its fingertips
and sending them, an unspun spiderweb,
through the air until they reached the limit
of the roaring light, thrown into the dancing shadows,
as if they existed, as if the quiet shuddered itself
into the afterlife and through the veil, was still, and rested.

It is hard to remember the future–my dry, chewed lips
tart with the taste of alkaline as I pace across the glass
of a car crashed street full of blurry signs, hours old,
my phone buzzing, full of backwards texts
and a high school buddy’s ringtone, even though
I lost his number in a gambling accident. The beer bottle
in my hand is sharp on my thumb with a cracked neck,
the top twisted off with the chisel of drunken teeth–
but it has been done by those of us
who look back into it, by someone crazy enough to plant
a mirror in the past like their first backyard garden
until, with the limbs of an oak, they grow into the reflection.

It is easier to recall an event when it is over–
the late night kiss you walked home in the rain
under a shared umbrella, the rush of your rollercoaster blood
when hope and fear mixed in the summer sweat
of your long-distance relationship with “I love you,”
the expanding dark of your eyes opening
over the blue-green haze of her flowering iris–

but if you can, you should remember it
as it happens, the recollection of water
(as an image stands from the river)
gathering itself back from her body
with the purpose of gravity rushing headlong
into the ocean of time, dripping from the glow of the sun
on her face, her hands shimmering
from the ripples of her bare feet
as she walks up onto brown rock,
flipping her shades down, smiling, quicksilvered.

And if the future does unfold itself
like a child on a swing, leaning his head back
toward the flying blue cloud of the sky,
into the unseen daylight stars, be gentle with it.
Draw it toward the thunderstorm echo of your heart
and with a whimsical dandelion sigh
send it out on the dragonfly wings of your breath.

Let it go: a bitter mouth will only be fed ashes
like a plate of barbecue wings carved
from the pile of a premature phoenix.
A rabid tongue of fire will lick your wounds
until it gnaws on the unfiltered cigarette of a scar.
Do not hold on to the fingerprint of a hot coal.

Let it go: the time your mother tried to protect you,
ran after you screaming down the driveway
and throwing your phone across the road
while you were joyriding your best friend’s
stepfather mustang to an underground garage party.

Let go. Somewhere in the crystalline fractal
of the past those dead, those tornado, spiraling wisps
of smoke are twisting with us into the future,
reaching the pyramid of their faces up into the space
between us and everything else that exists.

They do not need to be buried, though we will,
like the fading stain of ash on my mother’s blouse
as she flung her father-in-law’s remains
into the rolling mountains of Arkansas.

Memories are not kept the way choices are lost
by thinking about them, but making none.
Only a fool knows that. It is hard to eat smoke,
and when that wall of dust rushes over you,
when you have decided to wash with dirt,
when you see the future cascading from the sky
like a golden portal, liquid with eyes,
then you can remember now, the temple,
as it happens, fiery in its silent stillness, and the rest.